Ways of Unworlding: Against Aesthetic Inferentialism

I consider and support two claims about aesthetic experience: 1) that it involves encounters with a reality that is not conceptualized via such encounters; 2) that it can generate ruptures in established norms or in the production of shared worlds. This thesis is developed in the teeth of contemporary rationalist inhumanisms that draw on Nelson Goodman’s cognitivist aesthetics and his irrealist account of ‘worldmaking’ to translate the logical insights of inferentialism (or conceptual role semantics) into an aesthetics oriented towards concept-laden practices and their revision through the techniques of experimental art. I employ Derrida’s iterability argument to show that inferentialism presupposes a realist metaphysics that treats repetition and event individuation as independent of constitutive rules, conceptual schemes or ‘world versions’; indicating one way in which aesthetic material remains outside of, even recalcitrant to, the conceptual order. The aesthetic implications of this metaphysics of undecidable events are further explored by considering Jean-Pierre Caron’s recent discussion of Henry Flynt’s idea of ‘constitutive dissociations’ and, finally, the concept as, ambivalently, victim or suicide in the experimental horror of Gary Shipley’s novel Warewolff! and my own Snuff Memories.

Continuous Weave: Feminist Experimental Filmmaking Genealogies

In the year before her death in 2019, Barbara Hammer gave footage from four incomplete projects as well as funds she had procured from the Wexner Center for the Arts to four fellow filmmakers to use as they wished. Her footage of a Guatemalan marketplace and women weaving was given to Deborah Stratman, whose film Vever (for Barbara) (US, 2019) combines the work of two of her artistic predecessors, Hammer and Maya Deren. Making use of the footage Hammer shot in 1975 as well as passages, images, and sound from Deren's work, Stratman creates a film that underlines several tendencies of feminist experimental art and continues the legacy of all three women's art. Cooperative, collaborative, and productively fragmented, it honors the creative lineage of which it is a part.

Research on Art Intervention in Rural Design Based on the Cultural Ecology: A Case Study of the Xun Jiansi Village in Jiangxi Province, China

In 2021, the world will enter the post-epidemic era. China is at the end of the 13th Five-Year Plan for the integration of urban and rural development and rural revitalization. At the same time, the internal circular economy brings opportunities for rural development and regional revitalization. This article uses interdisciplinary research methods, integrates various design models involved in cultural ecology, and strengthens the connections between them, combined with innovative thinking in rural design, art promotion, cultural inheritance, and industrial upgrading paths. The article intends to solve how to use environmental art and public Art, experimental art and other art forms are involved in rural design, and based on the theoretical framework of cultural ecology, the rural design method is constructed through the case analysis of the Xun Jiansi village, and the innovative and characteristic development path of art intervention in rural design is studied.

The Representation and Agency of Artistic Interventions in Community in Mainland China

Based on immersive participatory observation of the curatorial practice of the 2019 OCAT exhibition Rural Construction through Art in Shenzhen, we identified two modes of community-based artistic interventions: a cultural “governance/capital” intervention deeply embedded in the social structure and a collective experimental art production intervention dissociated from the social structure. However, both forms of “production art” are essentially “unities of opposites” integrating incorporation and resistance, consistent with the socialist art policy of promoting the flourishing of all types of arts. Though the aesthetic divide between “art for society’s sake” and “art for art’s sake” positions these artistic interventions in different places in society, we argue that the domain of Chinese contemporary art is shifting away from the studio and toward scenes, events, experience, and dialogue. The approach of “the era of mass art” also means that “art-as-resistance” is being legitimized as “art-as-incorporation” in a subtle but unremitting way.

The Landscape of Węgajty Theatre

The alternative culture in Poland formed between the late 1970s and the second half of the 1990s. In this period many artists were moving from cities into the countryside in order to find space for independent and experimental art. Among these new settlers were Erdmute and Wacław Sobaszek, who made their home in a small rural settlement of Węgajty in the 1980s. The Sobaszeks converted an abandoned farm into a stage and soon their undertaking became one of the most prominent alternative theatres in Poland. This article explores intersections of the Sobaszeks's art and rural landscape through the lens of humanistic geography, anthropology and philosophy. The purpose of the article is to reveal a deep attachment of the artists to local, rural space and to examine how it shapes their performances and community building. In the article, the Węgajty Theatre is recognized as ‘landscape theatre’, a term which attempts to emphasize a bond between the theatre and the natural environment.

Turandot Carla Gozziego na scenie Teatru Ludowego w Nowej Hucie

The cultural peculiarity of Nowa Huta, a city founded after World War II, resulted from the lack of any artistic habits of the young audience. It was the Ludowy Theatre which, since 1955, had been bearing the responsibility for shaping up the expectations of the spectators in the new district of Krakow [Cracow] – dynamically developing but still devoid of any cultural foundations. The team of Skuszanka soon gained recognition among critics and elevated the newly created institution to the rank of an equal partner in the nationwide cultural exchange. The image of the Ludowy Theatre as a centre of progressive and experimental art quickly became even more profound, since it looked modern compared to the rather monotonous background of Krakow's theatres at that time. Thus, it became an institution whose opening, coinciding with the symbolic date of the Polish October, inaugurates a new season of the theatrical research. The aim of this paper is to illustrate this phenomenon by describing and analysing the performance that many of the contemporary critics called the flagship spectacle of the Nowa Huta theatre, i.e. Princess Turandot by Carlo Gozzi, directed by Krystyna Skuszanka. This play, drawing on fairy-tale plots and colourful Italian folk comedies, became not only an expression of opposition to socialist realism, but also a harbinger of the future activities of this institution, and perhaps even a reflection of the condition of the Polish theatre at that time.

Pressing “rewind” and “forward” to negotiate a transcultural position

The transcultural artistic strategies formulated in the Fluxus network during the 1960s, spanning Europe, East Asia, and the USA, are an important reference when searching for ways how to write art history in a global way. These strategies challenged national framings of art informed by the Eurocentric legacy of modernism. In this paper, I focus on Nam June Paik’s (self)positioning in negotiation with the taxonomic mechanisms of the Guggenheim Museum New York in 1994. I will analyze the conditions and limits of his cultural mediation. The first part of my chapter shows how Paik drew a fine-grained picture of Japanese experimental art as a Korean who had studied in Tokyo during the 1950s and then re-visited in the 1960s. In his version, Paik employs transcultural discursive strategies directed towards rewriting art history in ways that take account of multiple agencies and cultural entanglements. The second part of my study analyzes the resulting institutional conflict between Paik and Guggenheim’s Japanese survey show, Scream against the sky, to which he contributed an essay but declined to participate with his work. This paper articulates the transcultural (counter-) potential of artists who work(ed) across borders, especially at moments when Western canonization was a double-edged sword.

ARTPEDAGOGICAL VARIATION OF A POPULAR GAME MODEL

The purpose of this article is to present an experimental art pedagogical variation of a popular game model. The creative techniques used in the model aim to stimulate children’s creativity and creative imagination. A connection is sought between the figurative perception of the artistic image and the development of logical and associative thinking in children. The game model is expected to assist as a pedagogical resource in the learning process. The proposed author’s art pedagogical pedagogical model seeks to influence children’s creative perception. Its application is possible in the context of tasks related to child development, increasing interest and learning motivation.

Body and camera in motion — a dialogue between film and contemporary dance theater based on the experience gained in the making of the experimental art documentary Tensity

The paper presents the relationship between the worlds of film and dance theater, and the ways in which the medium of the performing body can be translated onto the screen by the director and cinematographer. By analyzing his own experiences and related artistic decisions made during the realization of the experimental documentary Tensity, the author looks at the clash of two different media and the relations that may result from the effort to translate dance theater performance into traditional film medium. Along with the change of medium, the nature of the work also changes and a completely new artistic value is created, enriched with elements unknown to theater, such as film editing, camera work and, finally, screen time. A film work based on the theatrical medium becomes a separate artistic creation, allowing the director and the cinematographer to build upon the foundation of the performative art of the actor/dancer.